Genesys is a generic table top role playing game system originally put out by Fantasy Flight Games and now put out by Edge Studios. As systems go it's fairly distinctive in its core mechanics and assumptions and rests comfortably in the center of the simulation, play, and story telling balance. It uses a custom dice set composed of six dice types with six symbols:
Boost dice: a sky blue cube marked with advantage and success symbols that represents advantageous circumstances.
Ability dice: a green octahedron marked with advantage and success symbols that represents aptitude or skill.
Proficiency dice: a yellow dodecahedron marked with advantage, success, and one triumph symbol which represents aptitude and skill.
Setback dice: a black cube marked with threat and failure symbols that represents disadvantageous circumstances.
Difficulty dice: a purple octahedron marked with threat and failure symbols that represents the difficulty of tasks.
Challenge dice: a dodecahedron marked with threat, failure, and one despair that represents serious danger and adversity.
Success: This symbol is the determinant of success on any roll. Rolls that have at least one success accomplish their aim.
Advantage: This symbol indicates a positive tilt to the outcome, whether success or failure.
Triumph: This symbol counts as a success and provides a major boon or activates a unique ability. In combat it is an automatic critical hit.
Failure: This symbol cancels out success on a one to one basis.
Complication: This symbol indicates a negative tilt to the outcome and cancels out advantage.
Despair: This symbol counts as a failure and provides a major bane or activates a special danger.
If you followed all of that then you have a basic understanding of the narrative dice system. As resolution mechanics goes it allows for bad success or good failures as well as the usual good success and bad failure with lots of gradation in that range. The six stats of brawn, agility, intellect, cunning, will, and presence modify around thirty fairly wide skills to form the dice pools. Stats go from one to five with a two being average. Skills range from zero to five. All rolls are skill rolls. For instance if a player wants to roll melee to swing a sword at an orc but has nothing in the melee skill he'll roll his brawn stat worth of ability dice. Once he has gained one level of skill in melee he'll swap one of the ability die for a proficiency die. This replacement continues until melee exceeds brawn at which point the dice pool starts gaining ability dice. The feature of replacing dice with better dice caps the size of the positive portion of the dice pools at five (ignoring boost dice) which makes reading the pool manageable at higher power levels.
Opposing the player/character's boost, ability, and proficiency dice are the game master's setback, difficulty, and challenge dice. Tasks are assigned a difficulty from zero to five and they receive that number of difficulty dice in the dice pool. Circumstantial difficulties like pouring rain are represented by set back dice. Difficulty dice can be upgraded into challenge dice in a few different ways which I'll detail in a bit. Okay, if your feeling overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I've just describe take a deep breath, let it out, and know that in my opinion this is no more complicated in practice than Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition. That may or may not be a comfort to you depending on your experience with d20 systems. The game has a few other mechanics worth mentioning. It uses wound points which count up rather than hit points that count down, strain acts as a universal representation of emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion or stress, and the players and game master can trade story points back and forth to upgrade dice.
Okay, I'm going to start with this games good points. Genesys is a fully functional generic role playing game system for playing as normal humans or humanoids in a number of settings. The core resolution mechanic feels natural and fairly intuitive once you've spent enough time with it. From the players' side of the table there is little ambiguity or confusion about how the game is played. Character creation is flexible without being overly simplistic. Archetypes and occupations grant a lot of options while still providing clear roles for characters. Character construction and advancement is straight forward point buy with talent trees that provide even development while curbing the worse abuses of minmaxing. Selecting difficulty on a scale of zero to five is a bit easier than selecting a challenge rating from one to infinity. I like having my own dice pool that is competing with the player pools.
Okay, list of positives out of the way it's time to start whining. I'm going to take a stand right now and say that this game is not for first time Game Masters. From one perspective the narrative dice are a chance for GMs to really stretch their creative muscles but imagine you have to adjudicate a failed perception roll for clues to a murder where the player got three advantage and a triumph. Per the logic of the system, they fail to find the clue but they should be pretty significantly rewarded. Do they find a treasure map? A new species of tree frog? Their true selves? The core book gives a lot of examples for combat and social encounters but not much else. As if that wasn't confusing enough consider this: there are three ways listed to upgrade difficulty dice into challenge die. One, use the NPC only talent adversary to upgrade all dice in roles against that NPC. Two, the GM spends a story point; giving it to the player. Three, the GM just does it arbitrarily because they feel like it. I have no problem with the first one but it seems like the second and third options are at odds. I can either reward my players for making their roll more difficult or not. As the GM it's always my prerogative to be as kind or capricious as I will but then why make this rule? It's not like I have unlimited story points either. Every one at the table gets one. I'm not empowered by the book to give them to my players for good roll play or whatever. They're only here for this. My best guess is that the story point economy makes sense in the context of other Genesys books and the core rules are just lacking. Last but not least, when a player exceeds their strain threshold they can no longer act. Strain, the representative of mental, physical, and emotional stress or fatigue causes a character to just go into a fugue state like a light being turned off. Apologies to whoever wrote that rule but that's just stupid. People get messed up and exhausted and at some point they stop functioning but to use the same track for every kind of tired and then having it be a binary off switch for player characters is just wrong. This is the first time I read a rule and didn't even consider running it as written. Lastly, The narrative dice are sold in packs of three ability and difficulty dice and two each of the other four kinds for a total of fourteen dice. This is not enough to represent a min-maxed character at the start of the game and that doesn't get better with character advancement. In short you have to buy two packs to start with to have proper dice pools. I have more issues but those are the big four. The first one is endemic to every part of the game but I can tolerate it because it's rare that it comes up. The next two are easy fixes which only really bother me because when I went looking for how other people dealt with it I found only blind acceptance which made me wonder if the problem is with me. The last one just feels like passive aggressive oversight on the part of the creators.
All in all, Genesys is a profoundly unique and original system with a lot of cool mechanics which I have a strong desire to explore and develop. Despite that I can't really recommend it because it's inferior to most other generic systems along a variety of dimensions. If you want a crunchy simulation system with extreme detail play GURPS. If you want a free form narrative driven system with open ended design play Fate. If you want something between the two Savage Worlds basically fits that description and uses the standard polyhedral dice which you can buy in bulk. Most of these games have better third party support and a lower price of entry. None of that is a reason not to play Genesys but it's going to be pretty far down the list of things to try or you just have some very specific objective for your table that it happens to fulfill. Product page here, DriveThruRPG page here, and fan support via subreddit here.